GEORGE Sodini, the man who opened fire in a Penn sylvania health club Tuesday night, felt decimated by his own mother and very likely killed because of it.

Sodini wrote an online diary that tells us a fair amount about who he was and gives us a window on why he would fire dozens of bullets into a room filled with women he didn’t know, then commit suicide.

Many people, even some psychiatrists, say such acts of brutality are unfathomable. But as a forensic psychiatrist who has evaluated and treated murderers and other very violent men and women, I have never met a single one whose physical destruction of others did not begin with their own psychological destruction.

Sodini, whom I never met, appears no different.

His murderous rampage seems to have been very much a projection of how dead he felt inside, a macabre and twisted and pathologic variant of the way a tortured artist channels the darkness in his soul onto a canvas.

In this case, the dead bodies of young women, their blood spilled on the floor of that gym — even his own corpse — were Sodini’s final mode of self-expression.

The lifelessness and fear in the scene he created, and even the hatred most people feel now toward him, probably tells us exactly what he had inside him: He felt dead. He felt the constant terror of feeling utterly alone and utterly helpless at his core. And he hated the people who had done it to him.

Who were these people?

According to Sodini, the first culprits were his family members. Sodini hated women, starting with his mother, whom he calls “vicious” and “the central boss.” He writes that she controlled him relentlessly — which, by the way, would have been a way of denying that he existed.

His father, described by him as a “useless sperm donor,” literally would not speak to him — another refusal to acknowledge that he was alive. His brother preyed upon him, rather than protecting him, bullying him in a way that would have required Sodini to try to bury intense feelings of vulnerability and impotence and rage.

This internment of emotion was the final nail in Sodini’s coffin, making him dead even to himself, a cauldron of incendiary emotions buried 6 feet under his very thick skin, destined to explode.

“It is easy for me to hide from my emotions for one more day,” he said on the YouTube video he posted. He added later, “My objective is to be real and learn to be emotional and to, you know, to be able to emotionally connect with people.”

It never happened. Sodini kept a lid on his shame, self-hatred, impotence and primitive rage until they boiled over, in one terrifying, act of self-expression that painted the picture of how dead he had felt his whole life.

Keith Ablow is a psychiatrist, Fox News Channel contributor and founder of livingthe truth.com. Contact him at in fo@keithablow.com